* Identify the true source of the conflict. One industrial psychologist we spoke with suggests that the real problem may not always be readily apparent.* Work conflicts usually come down to the most basic and personal things. The angry resident in question may have reacted the way he did because he was denied a privilege or simply because it was an inconvenience for him.* Go to the individual and ask to talk about the problem.* Don't just write off the person. Try to resolve the problem but understand that if your coworker's position is truly set in stone you may not reach a resolution.* When discussing the issue, be empathetic. If the angry resident revealed that he felt inconvenienced by the arrangement, the female resident could have responded, "I totally understand that. I would probably feel that way too, but unfortunately it's something that I really have to do which is why I'm so grateful that the hospital is helping me out this way." Acknowledging that you understand where your coworker is coming from may not solve the problem, but it will likely diffuse the situation. Everyone likes to feel that, at the very least, they are being heard.* Keep in mind that many times the answer to your problem is out of your and your supervisor's control. Large inst.i.tutions often have inflexible rules that don't lend themselves to an easy solution.

YOUR STAY-AT-HOME FRIENDS.

The friends you made when you stayed at home will have some weird reactions to you when you go back to work. Some will resent or envy you. Some will be supportive. Some will feel like you are making a statement against staying at home.

It's hard to navigate all the minefields, especially when you have much less time to devote to these relationships. Know that just as your circle of friends changed when you quit your job, it will change when you go back to work. At first you'll make promises to get together as much as ever and you'll mean it, but things will happen and some friends will fall by the wayside. Expect to keep close to one, maybe two of them. It'll be lonely at times, but you'll adapt like you've adapted to all the other changes.

Eva said her stay-at-home mom friends were actually angry at her. That's right, angry. They felt like she had betrayed them by going back to work. They said their husbands asked them why they couldn't go back to work if she was. She was the litmus test they were being held to. Remember, it's always the pioneer who gets the arrows. After a few months they'll calm down.

STRATEGIES FOR KEEPING IN TOUCH* Arrange to spend time with the mothers you befriended on the weekends. Set up weekend play dates with your kids.* Make sure you don't just talk about work. They'll think you're bragging no matter what you say.* In subtle and truthful ways, tell your friends what you envy about their situations. They are probably feeling a little insecure because in a sense they've been left behind. This kind of positive feedback will give them a boost.* Remember their birthdays. Show extra kindness and thoughtfulness. This kind of goodwill goes a long way when you have to ask these mothers to take your kid home from the soccer game.

READJUSTING TO NOT BEING YOUR OWN BOSS.

You've been your own CEO for the past few months or years. You knew what you had to accomplish and did it on your own schedule and in your own way. You woke up when you wanted, or more accurately, when your child wanted. You ate lunch when it was convenient. It didn't matter what you wore.

When you go back to work, you are no longer the ultimate authority in your life. It can chafe. It will feel unnatural. At times it will make you angry.

The first day Nellie went back to work for a marketing firm, she screwed up. She was sitting in a division meeting. Everyone was talking about a client's new campaign. The boss gave his opinion. She disagreed. She spoke up, which is a good thing, but then she tried to lead the meeting like she would a group of preschoolers. She spoke slowly, didn't use three-syllable words, and dominated the conversation. Her colleagues became very quiet. They waited for her to finish, then her boss ended the meeting.

"I was mortified. I forgot how to interact with adults," she said.

COMBATTING ANXIOUS FEELINGS* Prior to starting your new job, enlist a few allies outside the workplace to act as lifelines in the event you have a "dumb question." When Monica's sister, Lisa, returned to work, she was concerned about using a computer. Her husband, an IT expert, agreed she could call him.* Make sure you have competent child-care arrangements at home. Feeling that your children are safe in your absence will go a long way toward making you more effective on the job.* Identify key people at work who would be willing to show you the ropes. It's helpful to be friendly with the receptionist and other members of the support staff. The receptionist knows who everyone is and where they are in the pecking order. No matter how important your new job is, you certainly won't wow your new bosses if you can't quite figure out how to use the telephone.* Take advantage of the breaks offered by the company, but don't abuse them. You need to get up and stretch every once in a while. If you make sitting at your desk an endurance test, it will become one which you most likely will fail.

She apologized to her boss, promised it would never happen again, and was pretty quiet for the next few weeks until she learned how to play well with others.

Another friend had trouble adapting to an eight-hour workday. She felt like she was in detention.

She came in to work at 9:00 A.M. and by 11:00 A.M. she was looking at the clock praying for lunch. She would take walks around the office to ward off some of her closed-in feelings. She contemplated taking up smoking because she would have a legitimate excuse to stand outside the building for a few minutes every couple of hours.

She didn't start smoking, but it took her about three months to become accustomed to sitting at her desk for hours on end.

If you feel like you're going crazy when you return to work or you're nervous about undertaking this new experience, relax. Most of us feel that way.

THE GOING-BACK-TO-WORK REDISTRIBUTION OF POWER.

Your first job back will probably not pay as much as you used to make. This may hurt your ego. It will also be a trump card your husband may use, either unconsciously or extremely consciously. He may a.s.sume you should continue to take up the slack at home because you make less. Even if you work more hours than he does, it won't register as much as the salary. Plus, as we said before, men are creatures of habit. They like the status quo.

One woman forcibly rebalanced the division of labor when she went back to work. Every day she picked the children up from the babysitter, threw on her work-out clothes, handed the children over to her husband, and went to the gym for an hour. She did the enforced babysitter thing every day of the workweek. Her husband didn't like it, but what could he say, "How dare you leave me alone with my children, my flesh and blood?"

We're not advocating this exactly. We do think it's important to carve out time for yourself though, and in order to do that you'll have to shift some more responsibility to your husband. We'd recommend talking to him about it first.

Before you do talk to him, get the skinny on what the men think.

"I'm at work, if she's at home why shouldn't she start dinner and play with the children," one man said.

In fact, it annoys him that his wife, who works full time but not as many hours as he does, expects him to make dinner a couple times a week and play with the children when he gets home. He said that she's being juvenile, almost like another child, to demand he fulfill her needs without thinking of his.

"When I get home I need an hour or two to unwind. Playing with the children isn't unwinding. I have no problem spending time with them on the weekends. I take them to story hour. I have a problem when she thrusts them on me like it's some sort of duty," he said.

Another man was adamant he wasn't being chauvinistic, quite the contrary, he was being socialistic. He's a stockbroker. She's a social worker.

"We divide labor equally. I work and make money. She works a little. She should cook and watch the kids. That's how it should work in a fair world," he said. "Instead this whole women's movement thing has empowered women and given men less and less. If I tell her I worked a full day, so she should do the dishes, I'm a jerk."

Before you confront your husband for behavior similar to that of the men discussed above, try diplomacy. Explain to your husband what your responsibilities are each day and remind him what the definition of partner is-the kind of relationship where you help each other out. After you have been working a few months, a lot of the reentry problems will go away on their own because your job will no longer be new. It will be part of the routine, and we know men like the routine.

9.

Career Counseling When You Need a Change You know you want to go back to work but there's no way you want to go back to what you left behind.

A lot of the women we talked to had a career crisis after they had kids. Taking a couple years off to spend with your children gives you time to reexamine your life and what makes you happy. You realize that the thing you studied to be in college and then became wasn't what you thought it would be or that you've changed and it's no longer what you want.

We call it the lawyer syndrome. We're picking on lawyers because we'd say 99 percent of the women we interviewed who practiced law and took time off didn't want to go back to practicing. Most people who go to law school don't know what being a lawyer involves. They see the TV shows, think it sounds good (I'm an attorney), promises job security, and gives them another three years in school to figure things out. Then reality hits. They find themselves in jobs that take up most of their lives and they hate it.

Other careers fit this description-lots of other careers. Take journalism-after a few years of working at a newspaper and writing versions of the same story several times a year J.C. began to loath it. Most of the journalism majors she graduated college with are no longer in journalism, or they're desperate to get out of it.

Many women in scientific research get out of it when they have families. Recording and a.n.a.lyzing scientific results that are time sensitive isn't conducive to a twenty-hour-per-week schedule. Plus, science is evolving so rapidly that if you take a couple years off your knowledge base is dated.

Use the time at home to plan for your next career. Tammy went back to school. She tried her hand at writing-didn't pay enough. She worked for her husband. She sampled lots of different careers while her children were little. When she was ready to go back to work full time, she knew what she wanted to do and had some experience to back her up. She ended up working with her husband in his public relations firm.

That's what we're advocating. While you're home you have an opportunity to try what you love nearly risk free. Most people don't get this chance. Take advantage of it.

As Pat Harrison, president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, wisely advised, "Give yourself at home the job of preparing for the job you're going to have someday."

If you've always wanted to be a tennis pro, test drive it. Vocation Vacations is a Portland, Oregon, company that pairs you with experts in fifty fields ranging from doggy day care owner to cowboy boot maker. The company arranges for you to shadow the expert in his or her job for a few days.

IT'S THE CULTURE, STUPID As successful women bail out of the workforce to care for their children, at least some corporate leaders have taken a sharp turn inward to find out why.

In 1992, Deloitte & Touche, a business consulting firm, internally investigated why it was hemorrhaging so many qualified women from its ranks. The company's chairman and CEO at the time, J. Michael Cook, rounded up the firm's best and brightest to drill down on the underlying causes of these losses, stanch the bleeding, and prescribe long-term remedies like Personal Pursuits, a program that provides training, mentoring, and career coaching to stay-at-home moms who used to work for the firm.

Deloitte today enjoys less female turnover, more women partners, and unprecedented profitability. In the natural order of corporate cultures, D&T made all the right moves, to the mutual benefit of the company and its talent pool.

Other companies, like Tom's of Maine, a natural products company, and Athleta Corp., a women's sports apparel company, have also broken the code. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that an investment in their personnel has been squandered if their highly trained women are out the door just as they are reaching their more productive years with the organization. Some law firms, hardly considered a wellspring of progressive management innovations, offer part-time tracks to partnership. Not that it's a parade as yet, but a respectable number of corporations offer employees child care, job sharing arrangements, and flexible schedules.

BENEFITS TO LOOK FOR BEFORE SIGNING ON* Flexible hours-Ask your potential coworkers how flexible the hours are.* Sick policy-If your child suddenly becomes ill at school and you need to leave work to take her to the doctor, will this count against your own sick leave or will it apply to vacation days? Instead of asking this during an interview, ask if the company has any written policies you could take a look at later.* Vocation and holidays-Not every company follows the same holiday and vacation schedule. Monica's sister, for example, worked for several years for a French telecommunications company, which shut down the last two weeks of December with full pay to its employees. Some employers let you have President's Day off but not Columbus Day. Find out the vacation and holiday schedule for any prospective employer and compare it to your children's school schedule. If you see too much conflict between the two, the job might not be worth it.* Insurance-Does it cover just you or your entire family? How much will you have to contribute to the premium payments? How much is the deductible? Some insurance policies have such high deductibles for each family member that they really amount to no more than catastrophic coverage.

GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.

This is it. You can get a degree. Any degree you want. So what do you want? Think hard about what you might want to do. Interview other people doing it. See a career counselor. Shadow someone for a day.

Our friend Olivia went back to school to get a teaching degree specializing in math. Before she did, she subst.i.tute taught for a year. She taught a spectrum of grades and subjects. The experience allowed her to hone her focus to seventh grade-we can't believe it, but middle schoolers were her favorite group. Apparently, they're smart, articulate, and still malleable. We guess they're different at school.

She discovered that she made her best connections with kids in math. She said it's a subject that lots of students are intimidated by and she knew how to break it down for them. It was also her favorite subject when she was in school.

Olivia used to be a lawyer, but like so many attorneys she found the work tedious and boring. What did we tell you? It's the lawyer syndrome. She went to law school because she didn't know what she wanted to do after graduating college. Getting a law degree seemed like a safe and secure professional path. Her parents pushed her to do it as well.

She was offered a job at a good firm. That's when her problems began. She was miserable, but thought that's the way work works. When she stayed home with her daughter she realized how much she loathed her job. She talked to other mothers who had loved what they did and realized she needed to change.

Her decision to become a teacher came with sacrifices. Her salary is less than half of what it was as a lawyer. When she tells people she looks forward to working with preteens everyday, they look at her like she has had a nervous breakdown. When she says, "I'm a teacher," it doesn't have the same cachet as "I'm a lawyer."

The benefits are she loves what she does now. Her hours are the same as her children's and she has summers off. Plus, at the end of each day she feels like she has accomplished something real and tangible.

Another friend who was trained as a nurse, Natalie, went to medical school. You heard us right, medical school. She has a little boy and she's in medical school. We didn't know how she balanced everything until we sat down and asked her or tried to ask her. Trying to schedule time to interview her became an exercise in the absurd.

"Do you have a free half hour in the next couple of weeks?" we asked.

"No."

"In the next month?"

"I have fifteen minutes in three weeks."

"What about after school?"

"I'm picking up Todd."

"What about lunch? Can we talk during lunch?"

"I don't take lunch."

"You don't eat."

"I eat and study. I need that time."

We ended up meeting at a Chuck E. Cheese on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Our first question was, "Why do you do med school?"

"Because I love it," she said.

She loves school and loves her son, so she makes it work. Her son spends days at Natalie's mother's house. A lot of times her mother cooks dinners for Natalie to take home to her husband. Other times, Natalie's husband cooks. When all else fails, they order Chinese.

Natalie spends three hours playing with her son before she puts him to bed. She studies until midnight and gets up at 6:00A.M. to start all over again. There's not a lot of sleep built into the schedule, but Natalie says she makes up some sleep on the weekend. She is the most a.n.a.l retentive person out there. So when she says she spends three hours with her son and five hours studying, it really is that amount of time, not a minute more or less.

Her husband does the dishes, vacuums, and does a lot of the parenting on the weekends. He even planned their son's birthday party and made a cake decorated with Sponge Bob. He has had to learn to cook and make Todd's lunch. Natalie tells us about the cold pizza in brown paper bags that he sends him to school with. She is in charge of laundry.

"He's not always happy about picking up so much of the work. At times he says he feels like a single parent, but he understands what I'm doing is important," she says.

They took out a second mortgage on their home to pay for Natalie's education. They're in this together emotionally and financially. She has a year left of school and then there's residency and internships.

"Is it all worth it?" we ask her as she details the plan for the next four years of her life, which sounds much like what she does now but worse.

"Absolutely," she says.

Elsa took the slow approach to getting her college degree. She took ten years to earn her bachelor's degree. Part of the reason it took her so long was because she couldn't take more than two cla.s.ses a semester. She didn't have the child care. The other part of the reason was that taking cla.s.ses allowed her to get out of the house and use her brain. She enjoyed her education. She liked the idea of taking it slow and figuring out what she wanted to do along the way, and she knew she didn't want to go back to work until her youngest child started kindergarten. The way her children are s.p.a.ced she would have to stay home for ten years from the start of the oldest child to the kindergarten of the youngest.

If you don't have a university in your town that focuses on your area of interest, you could consider commuting to a college an hour or so away. Just make sure your cla.s.ses are all on the same day or in two days. You might also consider enrolling in an executive program in which there are intensive cla.s.ses over the weekend or during a two-week period for eight hours a day. There are also online universities to consider, although these are usually very expensive. We recommend talking to a counselor at your local college or even high school about your options.

INTERNSHIPS.

You're never too old to work for free. We know you're rolling your eyes and thinking you'll never do that, but internships are indeed worthwhile.

You get a real sense what the career you're thinking about is like. You meet valuable contacts and you see what it's going to take to get to where you want to be.

Our friend Jolie wanted to work in the movies. She applied for and got an internship working for a production company. She worked on a movie and realized a couple things. She didn't want to work on the film set. Working on the set involves a lot of standing around and waiting for fifteen to eighteen hours a day while getting spontaneously yelled at because you're the least important person there (aka scapegoat).

It wasn't a practical schedule for a mom who has to pick up her children at a certain hour, put them to bed by eight, and see her little ones on a regular basis. It's also nearly impossible to parent when there are large chunks of the day you aren't allowed to use your cell phone because the movie is filming. Ambient noise like ringing cell phones is a death-by-catty-stares offense.

After one too many babysitter emergencies, Jolie asked to be transferred off the set. She was sent to the art department. It was a G.o.dsend.

Designing sets is a creative process. Sticking to the budget as you build the sets is a whole different creative process. She loved scrounging around at garage sales for the perfect dumpy couch for a fraternity house set. She adored the challenge of finding a cheap, rentable, stuffed grizzly bear. She loved it, and she would've never known that she wanted to do it if she hadn't done the internship. She wouldn't have even known there was a job out there like set designer.

The contacts she made during the internship enabled her to get other jobs and work her way up in the industry. Film professionals are always searching for people who are dependable, flexible with hours, and able to do jobs ranging from two days to three months in length. Sound like a job for a stay-at-home mom to you?

Erin nearly said no to an internship that turned into a job. She wrote several freelance articles and built up a substantial portfolio. On a whim she sent her resume and clips in to a newspaper for a job. The recruiter called and offered her an internship. It was paid and lasted for twelve weeks but the recruiter said it absolutely wouldn't lead to a full-time position. Erin said no. She thought the recruiter had clearly spelled out that it was a dead-end proposition and she was a thirty-five-year-old woman. She felt above scrambling around an office getting coffee.

The next day the recruiter called Erin back and told her she should reconsider and take the position.

"It was funny. We were having this conversation where she didn't promise anything but I could tell in her tone that there might be a possible job after the internship. It was a wink-wink, nudge-nudge thing," she said.

Erin took the internship and worked her b.u.t.t off. She sucked up her pride and smiled her way through working alongside eighteen-year-olds writing obits and fluffy weather features. Major dailies are devoted to weather stories. Maybe it's the heavy senior citizen subscriber base, but you're not a journalist until you've written at least one weather story.

In addition to the nonchallenging a.s.signments Erin endured the eighteen-year-olds saying things like "You're that old!" and "You're a mother? What are you doing here?" For all her struggles and good work, Erin was offered a job as a reporter and took it.